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  As we started back toward Mom and the ambulance, he gave me a smile that was one-part annoyed and one-part impressed. “You and Claudia have been very busy.”

  “Dad, we’ve been taking this very seriously. I really think I can contribute something here.”

  It was then that he disconnected. He gave a firm shake of his head. “No, Paul. Out of the question.”

  “Did she say why I should be in the room?”

  He gave me a patient smile of amusement. “Son, I can guarantee you right now, she’s not who she claims to be. She just wants to ride the celebrity bandwagon. We get a few of these types at every high profile investigation. Unfortunately, we have to treat them all as if they might be a serious lead instead of a waste of precious time.”

  “You think she’s pretending to be the Tatum girl because of your connection to the investigation?”

  “That’s exactly what I think, Paul.”

  I studied the face of my father. “But what if she is?”

  His face tensed--something I wasn’t used to seeing on Mount Rushmore.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “Paul, go with your mother. As soon as I know something, I will let you know.” He gave me a squeeze and started back into the rectory.

  “Dad?” I said it in such a low tone, that he had no choice but to turn around one last time. “You never answered my question. Why did she say I should be in the room?”

  He sighed heavily and shook his head. “One of the first things you’ve got to learn about police work, Paul, is that until something is proven to be factual, it’s hearsay, and that’s something you cannot repeat to anyone, especially if its real intent is to cause agitation and confusion.”

  I watched him walk away and tried to understand the meaning of those ominous last words.

  Mom must have already explained the situation to Claudia and Mrs. Wicke, because by the time we got to the Wicke’s house, a bed had already been made for me on the fold-out couch in the living room. Mom was set-up in the upstairs guestroom down the hall from Claudia and Pat’s rooms, which Mrs. Wicke used as her office. Claudia’s mom had offered to take it, on the grounds that it was a mess with all of her papers and books, but when Mom refused to displace Mrs. Wicke from her own bed, she finally relented.

  Animated and full of questions, Claudia sat with me in the kitchen as I explained everything that had happened that day, carefully leaving out the part where I pass out… and the singing which preceded it.

  “Why did she want you in the room with them?”

  “It’s only hearsay,” I answered with irritation. “So he won’t tell me.”

  “If she’s not this Tatum girl, then who is she? Why would she be pretending to be someone who she’s not?”

  “And if she is the real deal, why is there a death certificate on file for her?”

  “Are you kidding,” Claudia replied. “Anything can be faked for a price. The question is why would she need to?”

  I considered the answer to that. What must the life of this woman have been like? Was it so difficult that she would need to completely cut all ties to her former life and start all over again?

  “No wonder your father had the deputies go and fetch you, Paul.”

  I glanced up at her. She was studying me with those piercing crystal balls of hers. “This is getting a little bizarre. I need to do some research on this Tatum woman tomorrow.”

  I was starting to worry about my father for the first time. He had made himself a target, and as a result, had put the rest of us in harm’s way. In addition to the pressure of identifying the killer in time to save the life of the next anonymous victim, all this must have been weighing pretty heavily on him. The resurrection of his old smoking habit didn’t seem like such a shocking thing anymore.

  The drinking, though. That worried me.

  I told her about my epiphany that each victim was a member of a different religion and that Dad had told me that it was the theory that they were currently working from. She went quiet. Soon after, I caught her humming the melody of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” and I knew better than to interrupt her.

  “But where does the ankh come in?” she finally murmured.

  “Or the tarot card?”

  “Well, tarot is associated with the occult and divination but not a particular religion and neither is the ankh. In fact, Egyptologists have never really agreed on where the ankh originally came from.”

  “Do Hindus use the ankh for religious practices?”

  “No,” she snapped then began nibbling the corner of her lip.

  “One thing’s for sure, neither of them have anything to do with their native family religion,” I concluded. “Sadie Nayar was Hindu and Kalim Al-Sahim was Muslim, and as far as I know, Muslims don’t use tarot cards.”

  When her eyes focused again, she leapt forward and pecked me on the mouth. “I think you may have hit on something!”

  I whipped up a batch of chocolate syrup on the stove just to have something to do besides sit under Claudia’s glaring spotlight and answer questions. We poured it over Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream and plunked down next to each other on the fold-out bed to watch The Exorcist on cable TV. That’s the only way to watch that movie. Unedited.

  We hadn’t even gotten to the first appearance of Father Merrin, (that iconic scene of the great Max Von Sydow taking that dark lonely walk up to the McNeill house with the eerie light shining down from Regan’s room), when Mom came downstairs and announced that it was time for bed, and what exactly did we think we were doing watching TV in the same bed.

  “Watching TV,” I answered.

  “Do you want to join us?” Claudia added diplomatically.

  “No, I’m going to bed, Claudia.” That was Mom’s I’ve-had-just-about-enough-of-your-smart-mouth tone. “And you should too.”

  Before Claudia could respond and make the situation any worse, I stepped in and told her, “It’s almost over. This is the best part.”

  Mom glanced at the screen. The demon was mocking Father Karras by speaking with the voice of his deceased mother. She made a face and turned to Mrs. Wicke, who was marching down the stairs.

  “Claudia! Up!”

  “Fine!” Claudia leaped up with a sound of exasperation and flopped down into the recliner. “Happy?”

  A look passed between Mrs. Wicke and my mother and they went into the kitchen, talking in low voices so that we couldn’t hear.

  Claudia couldn’t resist saying as loud as possible: “They’re afraid we’re going to make out to the soundtrack of The Exorcist!”

  “Yup, I don’t know about you, but projectile vomiting always puts me in that mood,” I murmured under my breath.

  Claudia cackled and threw a cushion at me.

  I hooked the cushion back at her. She caught it and whipped it right back at me, then snatched another one from the floor where it had been discarded and leapt at me, attempting to smother me with it. I promptly wrestled her back down and reversed the maneuver, putting the pillow over her own face. We struggled like that for a few heated minutes until my face was inches from hers. We were both red-faced and breathing heavy from the exertion. Claudia’s eyes were wide with mixed emotion as I hovered over her, my lips so close to her own.

  She twisted out of my grip and gave me one last playful shove to let me know that she wasn’t too upset before retreating to the recliner again.

  She sat there, looking clueless. Maybe she was. Maybe it was a girl-thing, that circumstances like this could be purely innocent, watching TV at midnight together in a fold-out bed and expecting the fellow next to you to keep his hands to himself, but it sure as hell wasn’t working for me.

  Keeping my dark thoughts to myself, I turned my back to her and faced the wall, a classic pouting maneuver that I had mastered as a child of five.

  Claudia swung her legs down to the floor and started up the stairs. “Maybe I should be going to bed now.”

  “Fine.”

  “Goodnigh
t.”

  I shut the TV off and tossed the remote over onto the coffee table.

  I heard her footfalls grow more and more distant as she mounted the stairs and drew further and further away from me and then disappeared completely.

  After about ten minutes, Mrs. Wicke and Mom said their “good nights,” and disappeared upstairs as well, the usual kiss from Mom conspicuously absent.

  I changed into the t-shirt and bottoms I had retrieved from home and lay there in the darkness thinking of the girl that was only a matter of feet away, directly above me, and completely out of my reach. I couldn’t go up there and staying here was driving me insane. Right now she was probably changing into the nightgown I had briefly glimpsed the other night in the yard. Being this close to her wasn’t better than being separated blocks from her. It was worse. I glanced at the watch on my wrist and realized that a scant fifteen minutes had gone by since she had left me. It felt like two hours.

  Finally, I gave up on ever getting any sleep that night and turned the TV back on. When I stirred again, I realized that I must have drifted off because it was two hours later. I shut the TV off and fell back under.

  When I open my eyes again, it is pitch black and I feel a cold wet draft seeping through my clothes. There’s a smell not unlike a freshly extinguished candle. The smell is all around me. The air is saturated with it.

  The mattress on which I slept had somehow turned hard. I lift my hands and press them against the surface. The texture is rough and splintery and ashen. My nails dig and it crumbles beneath them like the stone wall of a cavern.

  Then it hits me.

  I am inside.

  I am inside the House.

  I hear a creaking coming from the darkness before me. From the sound that bounces around the wide open darkness, I know there’s a vast space before me.

  “Hello?” the sound I make is infinitesimal, making about as much impact as a pebble tossed into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I know that if I am to be heard in this great abyss, I’ll have to make a lot more noise. So, I take a deep breath and with all the strength I can muster, I yell, “Hello!”

  A moment later, I awoke to find Claudia at my side. A light had gone on upstairs and Mom and Mrs. Wicke stepped out of their respective doorways.

  Claudia glanced up at them and gave them a wave and a smile. Mrs. Wicke yawned and disappeared back into her room, but Mom lingered there.

  For the time being, I was just aware of Claudia and of my own embarrassment of waking her. “Did I say something?”

  She scoffed. “You screamed, Paul.”

  “Screamed?” For the first time, I noticed that she was dressed in her sleeping clothes. Tonight, it was a baggy t-shirt and shorts. It wasn’t revealing or particularly tight, but because it was what she chose to wear to bed, it was infinitely intriguing to me.

  “Well, you yelled something. I couldn’t understand what it was.”

  I ran a hand through my hair. God, I was awake, but the raw intensity of the images remained with me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was only separated from the place I had been before by a matter of seconds. It was so fresh, the smell of burnt wood filled my nostrils.

  “God, Claudia, it was so damned real.”

  “Easy, man.” She sat down next to me on the bed and touched my forehead. I saw her glance up self-consciously over her shoulder. When I followed her eye-line, I caught my mother disappearing into her room. “You’re shaking.”

  “Am I?” I didn’t want to admit it, but I felt the trembling. Trouble was, I couldn’t tell if the cause was the dream or the sudden proximity of Claudia. The attraction to her was so strong now it was like a physical need. With every stroke of her hand, the desire to return the touch was becoming more irresistible. “I’m all right now, I guess.”

  “I don’t know about that. Maybe I oughtta hang around.”

  I shifted away from her.

  She just remained sitting there. I could feel her watching my back.

  “I think you were there, Claudia,” I whispered. “I think I was calling your name. I was trying to find you.”

  “Where?”

  “In that house. You were trapped somewhere inside and I was trying to find you, but I couldn’t find you.” I was shivering again, uncontrollably this time.

  Suddenly, I felt her there next to me, her body pressed against mine, her chest there in my back and her arms reaching around and holding me. She was making a soothing sort of shushing sound and stroking my forearm with her cool palm.

  The muscle spasms finally subsided as the warmth of Claudia’s body mingled with my own. I don’t know how long we lay like that together, but when I next opened my eyes, it was morning and she was gone.

  Chapter 19 (Sunday, October 18th)

  Despite all that happened the previous night (or perhaps because of it), Mom insisted that I go to mass with her again. She was up first, around eight o’clock, and started preparing breakfast for us as a way of thanking Mrs. Wicke for her hospitality on such short notice. Mrs. Wicke came down around nine. Claudia never did.

  “She rarely gets up before eleven or twelve on the weekends.”

  I figured as much.

  We gathered around the eggs, bacon, and toast that Mom had prepared and Mrs. Wicke said a quick grace that everything gets back to normal. I silently added that I hoped the killer would be caught and brought to justice, but how is justice meted out to a mass murderer, I wondered. You can only kill a man once. That hardly seemed like just punishment to a monster that caused so much misery, pain and death to so many others.

  I stared down at the wrinkled strips of fried pork flesh in my plate alongside the congealed chicken embryos and wasn’t quite as hungry anymore.

  “Your Mom tells me that you might have some interest in doing the same type of work as your father.”

  Though I was a little surprised at the topic, at least she hadn’t asked about my early morning screaming bout.

  “I don’t know about that. I told my Dad that if I can help, I want to do whatever I can.” I glanced over at Mom, who was scowling down at her plate. “If we all just stand around and let someone better qualified handle it, a lot more people will die.”

  Mom looked up and was on the verge of saying something when there was a loud knock on the door and a familiar voice called from the other side of the screened in front doorway.

  “C’mon in, Jack.”

  Mom leapt up and grabbed Dad up in her arms and gave him a long grand kiss. I looked politely down at my plate and Mrs. Wicke gave me an amused smile. “Did you get much sleep?” she asked him.

  “Managed a couple of hours,” he muttered, squeezing my shoulder.

  Mrs. Wicke pulled a chair out for him, and Mom slid the remainder of her eggs over to him, but he shook her away. “Please, Jack. You know my appetite.”

  With that, he snatched up the fork and went to town demolishing what was left of it. I fetched a mug from the cabinet and poured him some coffee. I sat it down in front of him and waited patiently.

  He glanced up at us. All our eyes were on him.

  “Well, any small talk I had to make pales in comparison to what you might have to say,” Mrs. Wicke snapped. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Let’s leave him alone,” Mom responded. “I’m sure he’s done all the talking he wants to do on this subject right now.”

  Dad seemed to ignore her and looked directly at me instead. “Though she claims to have information about the murders, she’s being very evasive.”

  “Does she know anything that isn’t common knowledge by now?” I asked.

  “She seems to know some things, though how much she knows from personal research”—his eyes flitted to me—“and how much she knows first-hand, she’s not saying.”

  “But is it her?”

  He cornered the last forkful between knife and fork. “She claims she’s Courtney Noble of Monroe, Louisiana. According to the portable fingerprinting we did on her, results are inconclusive,�
�� he said in an odd tone of voice that I couldn’t interpret. He dropped his knife and fork, leaving the last bit of food uneaten.

  “Dad, is it her?” I repeated.

  He peered up at me with a look that said, “Watch it, kid.”

  I took a different angle. “What does Uncle Hank say?”

  “Well, you know Hank. He’s got to be contrary just for the sake of it.” He took a swig of coffee. “I’ll say this much. If she is who she claims to be, she should be at least forty years old.” Dad just grunted and looked up at Mom. “I ask you, does that woman look forty to you?”

  Mom gave a single shake of her head and said with the serenity that comes from stating a simple fact, “Doesn’t look old enough for grey, I know that.”

  “No,” he said with finality and got up to refill his cup of coffee. When he was done, he continued standing at the sink, staring out into the front yard through the window there.

  I glanced up and found my mother staring at me with a kind of desperation in her eyes. I gave her a smile and a shrug.

  “Okay, Jack, we’re going to church, would you like to come with us?”

  “I just spent a good part of my night in that place, and you want me to go back?” He gave us a dark laugh.

  Mom stood and gave me a look that brought me to my feet as well.

  “What are you going to do now?” I asked him.

  “Go down to the station. Knock out a report on all this.”

  “What about the woman?”

  “What about her?” he looked around at me, his eyes angry and red.

  “Didn’t they take her into custody?”

  He cocked his head at me and gave me an almost crazed grin. “Oh, didn’t you know? Anyone can ask for sanctuary and…” He snapped his fingers in the air violently. “…They’re untouchable. Hell, wouldn’t matter if this is the exact same guy we’re after!”